Former comedian Jon Stewart admitted in a recent interview that he is “woke,” adding that he believes “we all participate in exploitative systems,” because sometimes it can be too “inconvenient” not to.
“I live in Manhattan. These buildings got here through bloodshed and through coercion — built on the burial grounds of Africans and, more than likely, hippies from the 1960s,” Stewart said during his recent appearance on the People’s Party With Talib Kweli podcast.
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Stewart went on to claim that the United States has “always criminalized struggle.”
“There were prisons known as debtors’ prisons,” he said. “If you couldn’t pay your bills, that was a legal offense to the system: ‘You cannot pay your bills, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you in a cage.’”
“When something has been built that way, it’s not enough to just say, ‘We will stop building more of it,’” Stewart continued. “If the effort isn’t made to dismantle those things, then they remain, not as inert, abandoned structures, but as structures that still have an effect to this day.”
Stewart insisted that “It’s not meant as an attack on those who live in them now. We all do.”
“We all participate in exploitative systems. I’m woke. My fucking phone is not, but I use it, because it has birds that are angry on it, and I love them,” he said.
“That’s what I meant by the humility of, like, I know what I am. I try and live to the good unless the inconvenience of it is too great,” Stewart added. “You’re always trying to figure out how to humble yourself on your own failings.”
Last year, Stewart had a public meltdown on Twitter over a Breitbart News report about his ratings — or lack thereof.
After Breitbart News reported that the former comedian’s new streaming show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, flopped, Stewart attacked Breitbart’s John Nolte in a Twitter thread riddled with exclamation points — but did not dispute the numbers.
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